On a remote volcanic island, where everyone wants to leave, little Nana learns to stay. Her mother, Nia, who suffers from a mysterious illness, left soon after she was born. When Nana starts running high fevers, she is sent to the foot of a volcano to be cured. There, she finds a world suspended between dreams and reality. Years later, when Nana is a teenager, Nia returns.

Hanami was filmed entirely on Fogo, one of the ten islands of the Cape Verde archipelago. The cast is made up mostly of non-actors, in their first experience of cinema. Daílma Mendes and Sanaya Andrade play Nana as a child and Nana as a teenager. The film also features French-Cape Verdean actress Alice da Luz in the role of Nia and Japanese actor Yuta Nakano in the role of Kenjiro. Hanami is one of the rare fiction feature films shot in Cape Verde and one of the first by a female director of Cape Verdean origin.

The hustle and bustle of the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Lisbon, the frenzy of a culture on the rise in the 1980s, the imminent upheaval of a story in a land that is shaking: the ‘Re/surgir’ [Re/emerge] film series features three films that give rise to conversations that don't leave the present day behind. Themes that keep resurfacing and are worth looking at through the cinema.

From the ghettos of Greater Lisbon at the end of the 1990s, in the first session with Outros Bairros [Other Neighbourhoods], we go back in time to the South Bronx where the fictional Beat Street faithfully portrays the emergence of Hip Hop culture. And finally, in the third session, we follow in Hanami the story and growth of Nana on the magical island of Fogo in Cape Verde.